Improving health care access for veterans and military retirees remains one of Sen. Jerry Moran’s top priorities.
Moran, the junior U.S. senator from Kansas, was in Iola Tuesday as part of a town hall meeting hosted by the Iola Kiwanis Club.
Moran is up for re-election, apparently without opposition, in November. As of this morning, no other candidate had filed to oppose him. (The filing deadline was noon.)
There, he spoke on a number of issues, ranging from the Zika virus to the upcoming presidential campaign with presumptive nominees Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Moran started his 45-minute discussion by talking about recent changes to allow veterans health care access in isolated parts of the state. Moran was an advocate of outreach clinics for those unable to easily make it to Veterans Affairs hospitals in Topeka, Wichita or Denver (for those in the western regions of the state).
“It’s been my goal a long time to get the VA to allow our veterans to access health care in their home towns, if that’s what they want,” Moran said. “As of two years ago, if you’re a veteran more than 40 miles from a VA facility, or you can’t get the service you need from VA within 30 days, the VA must provide those services you want at home.”
And while the effort has been well received locally, VA officials have resisted, Moran contends.
“The VA really doesn’t like this law,” he said. “And they’ve been implementing it in ways that make it very difficult for it to work.”
MORAN fielded several questions from the audience of about 35, including:
Campaign 2016
Moran offered tepid, at best, support of the presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, saying he will support him if, as expected, Trump’s opponent is Hillary Clinton.
“I don’t understand many of the things I see Donald Trump says,” Moran said. “I don’t know why he says them,” in particular his disparaging comments about Sen. John McCain and other POWs.
“My impression in visiting with Kansans is there’s a lot of dissatisfaction about the choices that we have,” he said.
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